The Poynter website picked up a transcript of a speech by Jerry Seib, the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau chief. Seib was at Lawrence, Kan., on William Allen White Day, Feb. 11, 2005, to pick up an award. Also see: http://www.ljworld.com/section/citynews/story/196001
The talk text poses important questions:
Can the practice of journalism be so vividly partisan that it ceases to be journalism? Or, when is news so rife with opinion, conjecture and unverified data that it cannot fairl be called news? Do we need to define this line in order to decide when a blogger is a reporter? Or does our traditional view of the First Amendment forbid any such line, making anyone who calls herself a reporter a reporter? And if that is the case -- that any citizen can be a reporter by declaring herself a reporter, then should there every be any formal rights -- or obligations -- which apply to them?
Here's the excerpt: "The task of journalism is to convey information honestly, not to confirm
pre-existing prejudices. Real journalism is harder and less comfortable
than the fake kind. That's precisely why democracy has depended upon it.
"So we're now on the edge of a dangerous slope. With economic pressures
high right now, we in the mainstream press will be -- indeed, already
are-- tempted to play to the crowd and package the news to please one side
or the other. If cynical activists think nobody is really objective
anyway, the path of least resistance is to please one side or the other --
the right or the left, conservative or liberal -- by providing it
what it wants. Then nobody will be playing it straight.
"And if that happens, society will lose is the notion that there is
objective truth. Can anybody believe that the national debate will be
better off if Fox News is viewed as the network of the right, say, and The
New York Times the newspaper of the left? In that world, what happens to
the very concept of straight news? What happens to journalism's important
if unenviable task of telling citizens uncomfortable truths that they may
not want to hear, but need to know?
Some will argue that there's nothing wrong with this trend, and they will
make two arguments. First, they will say that this is nothing new -- in
fact, that it merely takes journalism back to a model that exists today in
much of Europe, and one that existed earlier in this country's history,
where newspapers were openly partisan voices of one party or another.
"In fact, some will say that this is the way the news business was in the
day of William Allen White. But a closer look at his career puts the lie
to that notion. In preparation for today, I re-read the Autobiography of
William Allen White and it's quite instructive on this point. When William
Allen White took his first full-time job in the newspaper business, it was
in Eldorado, Kansas, and it was indeed a time when papers were openly
partisan, in their news pages as well as their editorial pages. Indeed, in
Eldorado there was one newspaper called the Eldorado Democrat and another
called the Eldorado Republican, and they were what their names
implied-papers published on behalf of the parties. William Allen White,
being a Republican, went to work for that one.
"But in the ensuing years, Mr. White came to see this as a deeply flawed
model for the kind of public-spirited journalism he came to embody. He
went to work for a truly great newspaper, The Kansas City Star, and was
shaped by the example its great owner, Col. William Rockhill Nelson. As
Mr. White later wrote: "He had no more use for corrupt Democrats than he
had for corrupt Republicans. He was absolutely independent politically,
and in every other way I knew. My admiration for him rose, and I tried to
make his ways my ways."
See also: http://www.journalism.ku.edu/school/waw/
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